A Band in Bondage

Being arrested was humiliating enough. Being hauled off to the police station in full stage attire--which for Eroticide singer Charles Delk means wearing a black leather restraining mask and a latex phallus that would induce penis envy in a snake--was more than he could stomach.

"I was dragged off to the police station in costume with a big boner and everything," Delk says, recounting the events that ensued after a recent show at the Nile Theater. "People were gawking and making comments about how sick and twisted the show was."

The Mesa Police Department had been trailing Eroticide for eight months after a lurid flier found in a fan's car prompted suspicion that the band's performances contained sexually explicit material. Then on Friday, August 1, 35 law enforcers--15 in plainclothes--stormed the Nile to catch the members of Eroticide with their pants down.

They were not disappointed.
At 10:45, band members took their places behind an ebony banner that read "Eat, Fuck, Kill." As the banner lurched to the floor, a green mist parted, revealing a nightmarish spectacle. At stage left, a woman was suspended by her ankles from wooden gallows. Thick chain links appeared to cut into her flesh. Upstage, two female dancers minimally clad in patent leather hugged and kissed and occasionally squirted each other with a substance that might have been mayonnaise.

In the center of the action, Delk stood bare-assed. Custom-made contact lenses made his eyes look milky white, and fake blood glistened through the holes of his leather garb. A modern-day S&M Romeo, Delk sauntered toward a rubber vagina the size of a mako's jaw (this thing's evil--it's got teeth), buried an arm deep inside and extracted a bloody doll. As another song kicked in (Eroticide churns out droning death metal which serves as a perfect backdrop for its theatrics), Delk reached for a hunting knife and--in true Gwarlike fashion--sawed off his phallus.

As if Delk hadn't racked up enough Brownie points with the fuzz that night, he strapped on a new phallus, one with the mayo stuff in it, and simulated sex with the dancers.

Suddenly, a member of the audience mounted the stage. "What's your point?" he said into the microphone. "What does all this mean?" A short-fused Delk replied, "You have two seconds to get the fuck off the stage!" The man refused to leave, whereupon Delk punched him in the face and threw him off the stage.

Delk said later, "I'm kind of in another world onstage. I can't see out of those contact lenses at all, and I heard this guy protesting and didn't know where he was. Finally, when I told him to get off the stage and he didn't listen, I gave him a push. When he came back at me, I floored him."

When Delk exited the stage, he was cuffed by a police officer. "At first, I was thinking it was this guy's dad retaliating for my decking his son," Delk says. "I was thinking, 'I'm gonna have to fight a big dad for making his son look stupid.' But then he threw handcuffs on me."

No charges were filed, but Delk, drummer Joel Whitfield, bassist Troy Mulder and guitarists Phil Hampson and Steve Jasinski, plus several dancers and stage techs, were arrested and held in custody for several hours at the Mesa Police Station before being released with no bail required.

Mike Lira-Pino, Eroticide's production manager, claims his rights were violated. "I was getting ready for the last song to end when an officer grabbed me by the hair and threw me out in front," he says. "I went to the back to see my wife, a dancer in the show, and they had arrested her. There was no notification, no rights were explained, nothing. It was a total destruction of rights, a total bad example.

"Besides," he adds, "the girls were all of age, they were fully clothed and they had latex around the nipples to prevent secretions, which is all in accordance with the law."

Then why were they arrested? According to detective Lisa McWilliams, one of the two case agents in charge of the investigation, after observing the band for almost a year, the Mesa Police Department "determined that Eroticide was not a good thing for minors to be seeing." McWilliams says the band violated Arizona's obscenity statutes, which prohibit "furnishing obscene or harmful items [including live performances] to minors." The band has yet to be charged, pending a decision by the County Attorney's Office. Meanwhile, band props confiscated from the show remain in the hands of the police.

One show at the Nile left a lasting impression on McWilliams: "The singer simulated intercourse with a rubber vagina, then pulled a bloody doll out of the vagina and ate the umbilical cord," she recalls. "He masturbated [in a simulated way], ejaculating all over [women posing as] nuns, and simulated having intercourse with them. Then he took another dildo with spikes on it and simulated intercourse with a baby doll. Even with a 21-and-up crowd, he still would be violating Arizona statutes."

Corey Adams, who promotes the majority of the Nile's shows, says he had passed on Eroticide. In fact, when the band was being hauled off to the clinker, he was fast asleep at his parents' house.

At midnight, Adams received a call from a frantic Shane Floerchinger, the Nile's in-house promoter who had booked Eroticide. Police officers were searching Adams' apartment, which sits above the club at 105 West Main.

"Shane said there were six or seven cops in my apartment. So I jumped in my van and hauled ass over there. The minute I walked across the street, several cops grabbed me, pushed me against their vehicle and slapped handcuffs on me.

"I asked if I was being charged with anything, and every time I asked for a warrant, they said I would see it later on. They drove me down to the station and stuck me in a dark room on the third floor until 6 a.m."

Adams says he was eventually shown a warrant which mentioned the Nile Theater, but did not include his apartment, which bears a different suite number from the bar.

The next day, he says, he was served with a second warrant, whereupon police officers confiscated his computer, Rolodex, business records, stereo system, driver's license and $3,000 from his safe which was not included in the police inventory.

McWilliams says that on the night of the show, officers were looking for the band's props and for Adams' business records and that they had thought his "office" was part of the Nile. "During that investigation," McWilliams says, "it was determined that Corey was in possession of stolen items." Detective Clay Faulkner says police returned the next day with a new search warrant, this one for stolen items, and found a "wall unit, stereo components, and miscellaneous furnishings." Adams has not yet been charged with anything.

"This is the last straw," Adams says. "I don't know how much more I can take of the City of Mesa. They're spending a lot of money hiring people to redesign the downtown area. The city just paid $1.2 million for the Bank One building directly across the street from us. They want to put in executive offices, retail space and a five-star restaurant on the bottom floor, and they don't want the Nile Theater across the street where there are Marilyn Manson look-alikes running around with skateboards and Mohawks. Unfortunately, we were here first."

Adams has been arrested before. When the Nile opened three and a half years ago, the building wasn't up to code and he was nailed for lacking proper permits.

But this time it's personal, says the promoter. "This thing that happened on Friday is 100 percent a plot to shut down the Nile. This is Mesa, and I'm the antichrist. They think I'm a big drug kingpin and money launderer, just rolling in the dough and living large, and that I film pornos in the basement. I think they thought they were going to find the mother lode."

Asked whether he regrets that the Eroticide show was all-ages, he says, "To tell you the truth, I probably would've made it a 21-and-up show. I wish I would've taken the time to oversee things, but it wasn't my show."

Meanwhile, a third warrant was issued to Charles Delk. Police officers confiscated a blow-up doll and a spiked phallus from the singer's Mesa home.

"They're determined to make me out to be a psychotic, twisted individual," Delk says. "This is what I do. I put a lot of time and money into this stuff, and it sucks to have the pigs come in and take all your stuff and not give it back."

Delk, who works in a tropical-fish store by day, has invested thousands of dollars in equipment and costumes since Eroticide formed in 1991. The tab for a recent show came to $1,100. His contact lenses alone cost $700.

Most of his props are handwrought, including the phalluses, for which Delk gladly shares a recipe over the phone. "First you sculpt it out of oil-based clay, and once you get your phallus made, you take a plaster-of-Paris cast off of it, and you cook it in a conventional oven for eight hours, then you airbrush it."

The process, he explains, yields toxic fumes and should not be attempted without proper ventilation: "I shouldn't be cooking rubber in my oven," he says. "It tends to give me memory loss. Besides, who wants to eat chicken that tastes like a condom?"

For that matter, who wants a dose of Eroticide's campy bad taste, grotesque theatrics, insanely monotonous music and wildly entertaining far-flung fantasies?

"Hey, we're not everyone's band," says Delk in defense. "And we're not out to corrupt anybody. We play to the already corrupted.